Abstract

The relationships between meteorite impact craters, flood basalt volcanism and sudden environmental perturbation on Earth have been debated extensively. We present only the second example of contemporaneous meteorite impact and flood basalt volcanism: the 17 km diameter Logoisk impact structure (Belarus) and Afro-Arabian flood volcanism. The new precise 40Ar/39Ar age of 29.71 ± 0.48 Ma for Logoisk is coincident with the acme of flood volcanism. We argue that at least one crater the size of Logoisk is likely to form during the emplacement of a flood volcanic province, and that contemporaneity of impacts and flood volcanism was the norm. The absence of a biotic effect from the combined Logoisk–Afro-Arabian volcanism we attribute to the magnitude of these combined events, which are both significantly smaller than the other known example of the Chicxulub impact event and the Deccan Traps flood volcanism.